Value Gamer's Dream
Written: May 26 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great speed at low resolutions,cheap,
great future support from Nvidia
Cons: Too slow at hi res gaming,FSAA useless,
cheaper faster cards available
The Bottom Line: The MX offers performance below the RADEON and the KyroII
It is a value gamer's dream,but not the best available.Go for the KyroII;it offers much superior performance.
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| lfctony's Full Review: Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 MX |
I owned this baby for about two months.Now of course I have
exchanged it for a Voodoo5,which I'm very pleased about.
However,this card offers some amazing low res gaming.That is
also the reason which is a value option.If you can afford a
system that can play games at over 80 fps at resolutions of 1024x768 and above,you wouldn't go for the MX,but for the GF2 or the V5 or even the GF3.
Performance was simply amazing compared to my old TNT2.All games run without problems at 640x480,blazing fast.However, I was surprised to see that it does not support 8-bit paletted textures,which means some of my old games like FFVII wouldn't play 3D accelerated.
One fact I was very "disturbed" to observe though, was that the memory bandwidth of this card was less than my old TNT2.
The TNT2 came with a default memory clock of 150Mhz SDR.
The GF2 MX came with 143Mhz DDR memory.Now you say "but DDR 143Mhz equals 286Mhz SDR".True but also false at the same time.You see,the catch here is that the Creative GF2 MX has
a memory path of 64Bit while the TNT2 has a memory path of
128Bit.Essentially,the MX has 143Mhz 128bit SDR memory which offers less speed than the 150Mhz 128bit SDR memory of the TNT2.(TNT2 offers 128BitSDRx150Mhz thus 2400 mb/s
compared to the GF2MX 64bitDDRx143Mhz giving 2288 mb/s)
This ia probably the reason the MX suffers such a performance blow when switching to higher resolutions.
Another feature that the MX offers is FSAA.Full-Scene antialiasing removes the jaggies you see in games around characters,the end of walls etc.Some people prefer to call it the "Staircase Effect" and it is very visible at low resolutions.However,due to the fact that Nvidia just added antialiasing in an update of drivers,it is quite obvious that it is done in software,unlike the V5,which performs FSAA in hardware.Thus,it is slower,and the visual quality
is also lower.What the GF line of card do in FSAA 2x is render the image at double the resolution you chose and scale it down to fit the screen.In 4x antialiasing the render it at 4 times higher and scale it down again.
However,this method requires a lot of memory,and a lot of memory bandwidth of which none the MX can be too proud of.
Overall,a very fast card,with a lot of features although some cannot be used.But,I cannot recommend this card,because
of faster cards available,at the same prices,like the KyroII and the Radeon.Go for one of those instead.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 200
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Epinions.com ID:
lfctony
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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